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The WIRED 100

Since 2010, we've regularly canvassed our network of entrepreneurs, investors, designers, scientists and policymakers to identify the key influencers in the WIRED world. We ask them to list the people at that moment who are shaping our culture, the tech economy, consumer behaviour, scientific discovery - in short, the people making things happen. We then process the responses to collate a consensus, cancelling out biases and personal conflicts as we rank the top 100. This year, we move beyond Europe to identify the global influencers. Meet the 2016 WIRED 100.

100. Bjarke Ingels

Founder, Bjarke Ingels Group, Copenhagen

BIG's flow of high-profile projects continues: Two World Trade Center, the Washington Redskins Stadium and the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion. Next: teaming up with Elon Musk on his Hyperloop project.

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99. Caitlyn Jenner

Retired Olympian and reinvented persona, New York

At 66, Jenner is "finally free" to be the defining transgender celebrity. Since June 2015, she has won 4m Twitter followers, 7.2m on Instagram and 1.5m on Facebook.

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98. Hiroshi Mikitani

Mikitani invested $300m in Uber rival Lyft and $100m in Pinterest in 2015. A mention in the Panama Papers and drop in personal fortune – to $6.7bn – caused a wobble, but is unlikely to derail his expansion plans.

97. Sina Afra

Entrepreneur, Istanbul

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Since exiting Turkey's online fashion retailer Markafoni in 2014, Afra has been focused on the eco-friendly UNDO Labs innovation studio, which aims to rethink everyday products. Its first reinvention: the shoelace.

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93. Martha Lane Fox

In April, Twitter announced Lane Fox was its latest addition to an ongoing, diversity-focused revamp of its board. Her mission will be to reignite growth – the firm reported no growth in users for the first time in February.

92. Ricardo Salinas Pliego

Founder, Grupo Salinas, Mexico City

The fourth-richest man in Mexico oversees an empire encompassing financial services, retail, media and telecomms. His blog argues against initiatives such as taxes on sugary drinks while championing wealth creation.

91. Lee Hai-Jin

Chairman and chief strategy officer, Naver Corporation, Seoul

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Lee Hae-Jin, 48, founded South Korea's main web portal and search engine, Naver, in 1999. It is part of web conglomerate NHN (after a 2001 merger with online games developer Hangame) and is now valued at more than $19 billion. Over the years, Naver has been adding more and more features: from an email service and a news website to an online comics news stand and a blogging platform. Recently, the company has been increasingly focusing on video content, broadcasting sports events, news programmes and even live concerts on its Naver Media Player.

Lee's brainchild is also a household name in Japan, where it launched its messaging and media-sharing app, Line, in 2011. First developed to facilitate the company's internal communications in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake, Line was later released to the general public. Today, it reports more than 218 million active monthly users around the world, and in 2015 it launched a cab-hailing service in Tokyo, Line Taxi.

90. Thomas Rabe

Chairman, Bertelsmann, Berlin

Since joining Bertelsmann in 2006, Rabe has steered the media giant through an increasingly digital world. The firm now owns, or has majority stakes in, outlets including RTL Group, Penguin and BMG music.

89. Yao Chen

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With 78 million followers on Weibo – China's version of Twitter – Yao packs serious clout. She is an outspoken critic of censorship, and is the first UNHCR goodwill ambassador in China.

88. Alexei Navalny

Russian opposition leader, Moscow

Navalny rose to prominence in 2009 when the eloquent Muscovite lawyer set up a LiveJournal blog in which he denounced political corruption, which he associated with then-prime minister Vladimir Putin and his cronies. Two years later, on Christmas Eve 2011, Navalny delivered a barnstorming speech in front of a large crowd in central Moscow, instantly becoming the public face of a short-lived popular movement opposing Putin's imminent return to the country's presidency.

Following the Russian Spring that wasn't, Navalny ran for Mayor of Moscow in 2013 (he came in second) and became leader of the Progress Party. As a serious politician, Navalny has started feeling the full weight of Kremlin's hostility: his party has repeatedly been forbidden from running in elections, most recently in April 2015; his close ally Boris Nemtsov was gunned down while walking in Moscow; Navalny himself has been indicted (and briefly imprisoned) on embezzlement charges largely believed to have been trumped up.

Forced out of mainstream politics, the 40-year-old is now back where he started: but with more than 1.5m Twitter followers and an influential blog in both Russian and English, his online pro-democracy crusade is not going to end soon.

86. Hakan Bas

Despite a portfolio of disparate interests, from animation to public relations, the fashion e-commerce entrepreneur still found time to back SuperMassive eSports, winners of the 2016 TCL Winter Playoffs.

84.Ilkka Paananen

WIRED tends to avoid buzzwords. But it's hard to ignore Europe's first "decacorn" – because Tencent valued the Clash of Clans games firm at $10.2 billion when it bought an 84 per cent stake from SoftBank.

83. Paul Graham

Co-founder, Y Combinator, Mountain View

Dorset-born Graham started as a computer-science theorist, exploring the potential of programming language Lisp, authoring several technical books and proposing the so-called "Blub paradox". In 1996, together with American computer scientist Robert Morris, he put his research into practice by launching Viaweb - a Lisp-based web application that made online stores possible.

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In 1998, Yahoo! bought Viaweb for $49 million and renamed it Yahoo! Store. After going back to researching computer science for some years, in 2005 Graham gave a seminal talk at Harvard University, in which he laid the essential rules for creating a startup. Shortly after, Graham, Morris and others launched Y Combinator – a seed accelerator that has so far backed more than 900 companies, including household names such as Dropbox, Airbnb, Coinbase, Reddit, Machine Zone and Weebly.

After almost a decade at the helm of the company – from which he vehemently opposed the US's anti-piracy law SOPA – Graham stepped down in 2014 (Sam Altman has taken over as president since); but even without a formal role, the 51-year-old keeps setting the tech-circle agenda from his influential blog.

82. Sascha Poignonnec & Jeremy Hodara

Co-CEOs, Africa Internet Group, Paris

French-born Poignonnec and Hodara might go down in history as the CEOs of Africa's first unicorn. Founded in 2012 with an investment from Berlin-based Rocket Internet (where Hodara and Poignonnec are managing directors), Africa Internet Group (AIG) has built its success by creating more than 70 companies across 26 countries. Among AIG's most successful creations are the "Nigerian Amazon" Jumia (currently the largest e-commerce company in Africa, operating in 11 countries), food-delivery service Hellofood, taxi-hailing app Easy Taxi, fashion online store Zando and hotel-booking service Jovago.

The success of Poignonnec and Hodara (both trained in finance) has been all the more remarkable in a continent where payment and logistics challenges have hindered e-commerce. But, over time, the group has managed to build trust, and now the CEOs predict that, in the same way Africa's shoddy landlines have been supplanted by mobile phones, e-commerce could provide a better alternative to understocked African malls and shops.

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French insurance giant AXA seems to believe they are right: in early 2016, it invested $83 million to get an eight per cent stake in the company, at a valuation of slightly more than $1 billion.

Edward Snowden

Autumn Whitehurst

81. Edward Snowden

Whistleblower, Moscow

The former NSA contractor continues to receive awards for his campaign against mass surveillance. With his current residency permit due to expire in August 2017, he'll stay in the news for the next 12 months.

80. Jeremy Farrar

Director, Wellcome Trust, London

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Farrar's Wellcome Trust gives £1 billion per year to tackle scientific, population and health problems. The director has pushed for more international support to be given to the World Health Organization to stop health emergencies.

79. Jonah Peretti

Investigations by Peretti's media empire have revealed problems with the National Crime Agency, and unveiled match-fixing in world tennis. It has also changed how the media looks at native advertising.

78. Eric Kuhn

Chief marketing officer, Layer3 TV, Denver

Hollywood's first "social media agent", Kuhn's focus has shifted to disrupting TV. At Layer3 TV, he is responsible for selling the public an all-in-one experience as habits switch to on-demand, online content providers.

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76. Riccardo Zacconi

Few mobile-gaming companies have the success of the Candy Crush creator. The firm Zacconi founded in 2003 was bought by Activision Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, for $5.9 billion in November 2015.

74. Chris Milk

In September, Milk debuted Waves of Grace, a haunting virtual reality film produced for the UN that details the horror and hope of the Ebola crisis. Milk is seen by some as VR's first auteur.

DJ Khaled

Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy

73. DJ Khaled

Snapchat icon; DJ and producer

Louisiana-born Khaled Mohamed Khaled, aka DJ Khaled, cut his musical chops in the early 00s as a host for Miami urban music radio WEDR. He proceeded to build a solid if not dazzling career as a mixtape DJ and music producer (he founded his label We The Best Music Group in 2008, and was appointed president of Def Jam South in 2009).

Then Snapchat happened. In October 2015, Khaled debuted on the messaging app, broadcasting puzzling videos explaining his "keys to success" – which included showering with Dove soap, eating egg-white-based delicacies cooked by his personal chef and smearing his body with cocoa butter. The hilariousness of the clips transformed Khaled into an internet phenomenon – he describes himself as a "human meme" – and today about two million people receive his posts.

On the strength of his online fame, in February 2016, Khaled, 40, started hosting a new show - We The Best on Apple Music's radio station Beats 1.

72. Ben Horowitz

Co-founder and general partner, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Park

Sometimes overshadowed by his partner, Marc Andreessen, Horowitz remains one of the smartest investors and most significant influencers in Silicon Valley.

71. Palmer Luckey

Founder, Oculus VR, Long Beach

On March 28, Oculus Rift launched a new era of virtual reality. Its $599 headset sold out within 14 minutes of going on sale. Mark Zuckerberg claims VR could become "the next platform".

70. Megan Smith

United States chief technology officer, Washington DC

Fifty-one-year-old Smith has the president's ear when it comes to technology policy, data, innovation and broadband access. Barack Obama created the position early in his first term, and the New Yorker was the third to be appointed to the post in 2014. She holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering from MIT, where she serves on its board, as well as the advisory board for the MIT Media Lab.

Her career in tech began when working on internet applications at AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and Apple Japan, until taking over as CEO of LGBT online community PlanetOut in 1996. In those years, she also took part in several successful engineering projects, ranging from award-winning bike locks to space stations.

In 2003, Google hired her as a vice president of new business development; nine years later, Smith joined the leadership team of Mountain View's moonshot factory Google[x] – where she contributed to the launch of think tank Solve For X.

Smith has been vocal about the need for more girls to take courses in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and is outspoken in calling for more women in senior tech and science roles.

She is co-founder of the Malala Fund, an organisation working to deliver quality education to girls – in particular those living in developing countries. No one in 2016 has more influence on US tech policy.

69. Geoffrey Hinton

Psychologist, computer scientist; researcher, Google Toronto

British-born Hinton has been dubbed the "godfather of deep learning". The Cambridge-educated cognitive psychologist and computer scientist started being an ardent believer in the potential of neural networks and deep learning in the 80s, when those technologies enjoyed little support in the wider AI community.

But he soldiered on: in 2004, with support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, he launched a University of Toronto programme in neural computation and adaptive perception, where, with a group of researchers, he carried on investigating how to create computers that could behave like brains.

Hinton's work – in particular his algorithms that train multilayered neural networks – caught the attention of tech giants in Silicon Valley, which realised how deep learning could be applied to voice recognition, predictive search and machine vision.

The spike in interest prompted him to launch a free course on neural networks on e-learning platform Coursera in 2012. Today, 68-year-old Hinton is chair of machine learning at the University of Toronto and moonlights at Google, where he has been using deep learning to help build internet tools since 2013.

68. Alexander Kudlich

Group MD, Rocket Internet, Berlin

This year has been tough for Rocket, but its top 12 startup businesses, ranging from fashion to food deliveries, cut losses by an average of 23 per cent in the first three months of 2016.

67. Vitalik Buterin

Co-founder, Ethereum, Switzerland

In 2015, the 22-year-old programmer and co-founder of Bitcoin magazine co-founded a cryptocurrency platform that prompted a $200 million crowdfunding project, the biggest yet.

66. PewDiePie

YouTuber, Brighton

In just six years, 26-year-old Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg has risen from dropout who funded his videos by working at a hot-dog stand to a $12 million global internet sensation. Kjellberg – aka PewDiePie – has built a quasi-cult fandom by uploading longish videos (Is This Game Too Sexual?!; Worst Game on the Planet!; What Happened To Resident Evil 7??) where he fools around and cracks jokes while playing video games.

In May 2016, Kjellberg's YouTube channel passed 45 million subscribers and, with 12 billion views, it's now the most-watched channel in the history of the video-sharing website. In the gaming industry, it is thought that he can single-handedly determine the success of a game by simply mentioning it in one of his videos.

Kjellberg – who lives in Brighton with his girlfriend and fellow YouTuber Marzia Bisognin, aka CutiePieMarzia – has tried to use his online clout for good, asking his fanbase (dubbed the "Bro Army") to raise money for charities on several occasions.

Recently, he teamed up with The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman to produce his first web series – Scare PewDiePie. The series, which features the YouTuber cavorting in horror-game-like situations, debuted on YouTube Red in February 2016.

65. Kara Swisher

Swisher has parlayed a career as a tech journalist at The Wall Street Journal to co-founding Recode, a media company showcasing Silicon Valley's big-hitters. She announced in April she would run for mayor of San Francisco in 2023.

64. Eric Ries

Entrepreneur and pioneer of the startup movement, San Francisco

Last year, Ries, a pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, raised $588,903 on Kickstarter for The Leader's Guide. Now he's building his own stock exchange.

63. Yann Lecun

Director of AI research, Facebook, Menlo Park

LeCun is a leading expert in deep learning and heads up what, for Facebook, could be a hugely significant source of revenue: understanding its user's intentions.

62. Richard Branson

Founder, Virgin Group, London

Branson saw his personal fortune grow £550 million when Alaska Air bought Virgin America for $2.6 billion in April. He is pressing on with civilian space travel with Virgin Galactic.

61. Taylor Swift

Entertainer, Los Angeles

Taylor Swift

Sergio Membrillas

Taylor Swift looks and sounds like just another pop star being run by a major record label. But don't be fooled. A sequence of clever career decisions, strong principles and an enormous fanbase put her in a uniquely powerful position within the music industry.

Her work might be distributed by Universal Music Group, but she's actually signed to a small indie label called Big Machine, based in Nashville, which enables Swift, 26, to take autonomous decisions. She does this under the guidance of Big Machine's founder Scott Borchetta, 53, who has protected her career since he discovered her aged 14.

Her shift from country music – she had four successful albums in the genre – to pop in 2014 allowed her to expand her influence to new audiences beyond the US. With more than 40 million album sales under her belt, and an huge social media following (she has 84 million followers on Instagram, 80 million on Twitter and 75 million on Facebook), the outspoken feminist has a lot of leverage, particularly among the teenage demographic that so many brands struggle to connect with. And she's not afraid to use it.

When Apple announced it would be offering a three-month free trial of its Apple Music streaming service, independent-rights holders objected and refused to license their music: the free trial meant no royalties for artists. The dispute, spearheaded by Adele's record label XL Recordings, rumbled on for months, but it took an open letter by Swift to force Apple into a U-turn.

In a Tumblr post titled "To Apple, Love Taylor," posted at 4am on June 21, 2015, Swift described Apple Music's initial terms as "shocking" and "disappointing" and revealed that she would withhold her music from the platform.

"We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation," she said. Her millions of devoted fans – or "Swifties" – amplified the message. Within a matter of hours, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president, announced on Twitter that the world's then most valuable company had decided to pay artists during the free trial after all.

"We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple," he posted.The Apple Music protest followed a similar stance taken with Spotify, from which she pulled her discography six months earlier, just as she was launching her fifth album, 1989.

Again, Swift's reasons focused on the value of art and her dislike for Spotify's freemium model.

Fans were driven to buy the album rather than stream it, and it ended up selling 1.29 million copies in its first week of release, the biggest seven-day sales of any album since 2002. Since then, Swift has made it clear she's on Team Apple, signing an exclusive deal to debut her tour documentary on Apple Music and appearing in a series of adverts for the company.

In one, which she shared through her social channels, she's seen running on a treadmill singing along to Drake's "Jumpman". The exposure was enough to send iTunes sales of the track up 431 per cent within a week.

57. Marc Benioff

The billionaire investor and philanthropist continues to wield big influence in the Valley – but it's his social campaigning, notably on equal pay and gay rights, that have lately boosted his influence.

55. Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield is the tech world's king of serendipity. Born in 1973 on a British Columbia commune, he developed a massive multiplayer online video game called Game Neverending. The project wasn't a success – in fact, it never even launched – but the entrepreneur quickly realised that one of the game's key features – which allowed for instant image sharing – could exist as a standalone product. That was how, in 2004, he co-founded Flickr. The image-hosting service was an immediate global hit, and was bought by Yahoo! for around $25 million the following year.

After leaving Flickr in 2008, Butterfield launched a new game, Glitch, which was another disappointment, but repurposed one of the technologies spawned during its development into something bigger: Slack, a team-messaging tool that has become the gold standard of interoffice communications since its launch in 2013.

Slack initially spread through Silicon Valley via word-of-mouth; today it reports three million users every day – and 800,000 premium accounts, including organisations such as BuzzFeed, LinkedIn and the US Department of State. Butterfield's company has so far raised about $300 million in venture capital, and recent estimates pin its value at up to $4 billion.

To cap his successful spell, Stewart was named The Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovator for 2015.

54. Shervin Pishevar

Tehran-born Pishevar is mostly known for leading a hefty series-B investment round in Uber in 2011, as a managing director of Menlo Ventures. Today, the 42-year-old has an interest in Airbnb, Slack, videogame developer Machine Zone and high-end food delivery service Munchery through his new company, Sherpa Capital.

In recent months, Pishevar has been focusing on mobility as an investor and chairman of Hyperloop One, one of the ventures trying to bring about the tube-based high-speed transportation system conceived by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Pishevar has publicly come out in support of Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the US presidential race, hosting a $33,400 per person, George Clooney-sponsored fundraising event for her at his San Francisco mansion in April 2016. He is also a member of the UN Foundation's Global Entrepreneurs Council.

53. Niklas Zennström

Zennström's London-based tech fund has a growing portfolio of startups based in Beijing, Berlin, London, São Paulo and Stockholm. Having raised $1.39 billion since 2006, it has taken significant stakes in Supercell, Skype and Jawbone.

52. Yossi Vardi

Conference chair; investor, Tel Aviv, Israel

Even at 74, the godfather of Israeli tech remains a force, speaking prolifically at (and organising) conferences worldwide. On planes for much of the year, he is an unusually powerful gatekeeper.

51. Liu Qiangdong

Founder and CEO, JD.com, Beijing

In 1998, ex-restaurateur Liu Qiangdong opened an electronics store in central Beijing. In January 2004, when the deadly SARS outbreak was scaring customers in China away from shops in their thousands, he decided to expand the company into e-commerce.

Today, Liu's shop has grown into JD.com, also known as Jingdong Mall – an e-commerce giant that in 2015 reported 155m active customer accounts and annual revenues of about $28bn.

The 42-year-old's formula to fend off counterfeits and shoddy merchandise is to be true to the company's bricks-and-mortar origins: JD.com itself buys goods (from electronics to clothes and jewellery) from producers and re-sells them to customers after quality checks.

Being directly in charge of distribution and delivery, JD.com has managed to scale up its presence in China's smaller inland cities, eroding the monopoly of e-commerce titan Alibaba in those areas.

And Liu – who since 2015 has been earning a yearly salary of £0.11 – is increasingly looking westward: the company opened its English-language website joybuy.co.uk in 2012, launched its Nasdaq IPO in 2014, and between 2015 and 2016 it clinched high-profile partnerships with brands as disparate as pop singer Taylor Swift (see 61) and Liverpool Football Club.

In January 2016, JD.com even gained a foothold in Silicon Valley with a $50m investment in smartphone shopping app wish.com.

48. Jack Dorsey

In July 2015, Dorsey became Twitter's CEO. But, troubled by usability issues and the departure of senior executives, he has been unable to prevent it falling behind Snapchat in terms of daily active users.

47. Martin Sorrell

In 2015, the world's biggest advertising group made 37 per cent of its £12.2 billion revenues from digital. Google is the leading recipient at £2.7 billion but Sorrell has charged it with operating a "walled garden".

46. Rony Abovitz

In February, Abovitz's augmented reality startup raised $793 million, taking its funding to $1.4bn. Although its products are still secret, investors like Qualcomm and Warner Bros have created big expectations.

45. Papa Francisco

Pope, The Vatican, Rome

The most influential world leader on Twitter is not US president Barack Obama but the 79-year-old sovereign of the world's smallest nation, whose arrival on the social network was announced in a long-dead language with the words, "Habemus papam franciscum."

Though Obama has secured the largest following, when it comes to retweets, the Spanish-language @Pontifex_es – one of nine papal accounts including a rather less influential Latin version – blows others out of the water with an average of 9,929 retweets per post, more than twice that of second-placed King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

And Pope Francis is using that influence to spread more than just the gospel. His 400,000-word encyclical on climate change, released in June 2015 then summarised through Twitter, was the most in-depth papal engagement – yet with the science of humanity's environmental impact and a powerful declaration of our obligation to prevent its destruction.

The statement followed his comments in 2014 that scientific accounts of the origin of the Universe are not incompatible with religious ones. Indeed, he told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that "The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it."

44. Joi Ito

Continuing his mission to promote antidisciplinarity, in February Ito launched the Journal of Design and Science, which included papers from architect Neri Oxman and inventor Danny Hillis.

Jean Liu & Cheng Wei

Jean-Michel Tixier

43. Jean Liu & Cheng Wei

CEO, president, Didi Chuxing, Beijing

In China, two local ride-hailing services have joined forces to fend off an Uber invasion. In February 2015, Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache, backed respectively by Tencent and Alibaba, announced their merger, with Didi's Cheng Wei and Kuaidi's Dexter Chuanwei Lu becoming co-CEOs of the newly formed Didi Chuxing.

Together they've wrapped up much of China's ride-hailing app market, with the company claiming an 87 per cent market share (market research firm Mintel says it's more like 60 per cent).

Behind the deal was Didi Dache's president and former Goldman Sachs managing director Jean Liu. Now president of Didi Chuxing, Liu has since brought in $1 billion in investment from Apple. In April 2016, Didi began to encroach on Uber's home turf through a partnership with Lyft that allows Didi users to hire the US company's cars through their app and vice versa.

Similar partnerships with Ola in India and Grab in Southeast Asia are set to roll out next year.

42. Susan Wojcicki

Wojcicki is focused on turning YouTube into an unassailable business, promising its creators "freedom of expression, freedom of information and freedom of opportunity" – and charging for ad-free subscriptions.

41. Tim O'Reilly

Publisher, San Francisco

The man who popularised the terms "open-source" and "Web 2.0" is now asking companies to re-evaluate how they navigate the "Next Economy" – the transformation of work and business in the digital age.

40. Brent Hoberman

Entrepreneur, investor, London

In May, the Lastminute.com and Founders Forum founder and investor announced he would create 200 new British tech startups over the next five years through Founders Factory.

39. Mary Meeker

For 21 years, Mary Meeker's mammoth annual slideshow has summed up the evolving state of the internet. It remains a must-read. Across hundreds of graphs, the annual Internet Trend Report, which she now produces as a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has chronicled the rise and fall of tech empires: all but one name (Apple) on the 1995 list of highest market cap public internet companies has now vanished.

Meeker made her name at Morgan Stanley in the 90s, steering Netscape's 1995 IPO and working on Google's. She went on to popularise the idea that profit-less companies could become profitable investments.

38. Bill Gates

In June, Mission Innovation, a coalition of 21 countries – and Bill Gates's resources of $40 billion – pledged to double financing for energy research and development.

37. Lu Wei

China's chief internet censor, Beijing

As information gatekeeper to nearly a fifth of the world's population, China's cyberspace administration minister has both enormous power and an incredibly difficult task on his hands. In the face of foreign companies, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Lu's dictate has been absolute: conform to our rules or remain blocked from the country's internet entirely. Such a ban helps homegrown companies – which comply with censorship regulations – to flourish.

A random sampling of posts on Chinese microblogging site Weibo in a study at the University of California has revealed a censorship rate of around 13 to 16 per cent. Yet selectively pruning the postings of nearly 200 million users proves easier said than done, as in 2011 when mass outrage at the government's response to a deadly train crash kept it as most discussed topic on the social network for three days' running.

Lu's hardline stance finally wavered in June when he unexpectedly announced his resignation from the post, but his influence on the country's online activities will loom large for years.

35. Daniel Ek

Spotify's subscriber base has grown to 30 million, and, while it still loses money, its most recent year-on-year revenue growth was a handsome 81 per cent, with the company valued at around $8 billion.

33. Reid Hoffman

LinkedIn didn't have the best start to 2016, with a disappointing revenue forecast leading to a 46 per cent share drop. But its future looks brighter since it was announced that Microsoft was buying it for $26.2bn.

28. Evan Spiegel

In 2011, when a 21-year-old Evan Spiegel (above) demonstrated his disappearing-photo app for a class project at Stanford University, his fellow students and visiting VCs all declared it a terrible idea. Then, in 2012, Facebook offered $3 billion for Snapchat, only to be rejected by the owner of a still revenue-less app.

Today, it processes around 9,000 Snaps a second, and in January 2015 Spiegel launched Snapchat Discover, revealing why it was worth turning down $3 billion.

26. Beatriz Acevedo

In the great millennial media scramble, Beatriz Acevedo had firmly claimed her own niche: young Latinos looking for more than the cheesy telenovelas of Hispanic broadcast media.

With 55 million Latinos in the US alone, 60 per cent of whom are millennial or younger, that's a substantial niche. Since she cofounded MiTú in 2012, the multichannel digital network's 7,000 Latino content creators have built an audience of more than 100 million global subscribers, through multilingual beauty, cooking, comedy and lifestyle shows across YouTube, Vine, Instagram and Facebook.

That audience has drawn the interest of Pepsi, Nestlé, T-Mobile and Microsoft, who've all sponsored native advertising and product placement with MiTú's creators. In January this year, MiTú raised $27 million from investors including DreamWorks Animation, WPP Digital, and Verizon Ventures, bringing total funding to $43 million. The major broadcast networks have also taken an interest.

NBC Universo, Universal and Discovery TV all distribute the network's content and, since 2014, Mitú has been partnering with Televisa, the world's largest Spanish language mass media company.

25. Sundar Pichai

CEO, Google Inc, Palo Alto

The 44-year-old ex-McKinsey consultant joined Google in 2004, to oversee Chrome and Google Drive before running Gmail and Google Maps. Now he's betting the company's future on machine learning.

24. James Murdoch

In January, Murdoch returned to the helm of Sky after stepping down four years earlier. He has global influence over content creation and distribution, and Sky's revenue increased five per cent in 2015, to £5.7bn.

23. Jong-Kyun Shin

Samsung remains a significant tech player, making $6.4 billion in profits in Q4 2015 alone. In May 2015, it announced it would build a network for the internet of things, with SK Telecom, to cover all of South Korea.

22. Bob Van Dijk

Chinese-African economic interaction usually follows a pattern: China invests, China profits. But, in 2001, it was South African media group Naspers that struck gold with the purchase of 46.5 per cent of what was then a small Chinese startup, Tencent Holdings. B

ought for $34m, that share is now worth more than $60bn, making Naspers the largest media company in Africa. Now Bob Van Dijk, CEO since 2014 and formerly VP of European expansion at eBay, is looking to move beyond Tencent.

In Brazil, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Thailand, the company is developing joint ventures in online classifieds with former competitors Norwegian Schibsted Media Group and Telenor Group alongside Singapore Press Holdings.

Meanwhile, Naspers is challenging Netflix's African expansion with the rollout of its own internet TV service, ShowMax, to 36 countries across sub-Saharan Africa since launch in August 2015.

21. Satoshi Nakamoto

Anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, location unknown

Entrepreneur Craig Wright claimed to be Nakamoto, but identity is a moot point. Bitcoin aims to transform the global economy by taking banks from the process.

20. Yuri Milner

Founder, Digital Sky Technologies, Moscow

His investments range from Facebook, Zynga and Zocdoc to Spotify and Xiaomi. His next ambitious move is the patronage of a science project for a probe that could travel to Alpha Centauri.

18. Jennifer Doudna & Emmanuelle Charpentier

The impact of CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that allows the first precise genome edits, is indisputable. Its provenance, however, is not. Conflicting patent applications, one by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the University of California Berkeley, and another by Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, were both filed in 2013. Though the Berkeley team's was submitted earlier, the latter was granted in April 2014, leading Berkeley to request an investigation.

In the middle of one contentious debate, another arose. In April 2015, a group of Chinese scientists revealed they'd used CRISPR-Cas9 to perform the first genetic edits to human embryos. Although the embryos were non-viable, Doudna called for a pause on such experiments until the implications are better understood.

16. Satya Nadella

Nadella, 48, will in 2017 publish a book called Hit Refresh. That's apt, considering his mission to transform Microsoft as the "professional cloud" – not least with his recent $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn.

15. Li Ka-Shing

China's economic woes may have shaken investors, but Hong Kong's richest man has less reason to panic. Since 2012, when Europe's contribution to the operating profit of Li's CK Hutchison Holdings overtook China's, the famously prescient tycoon has been moving his focus towards the west with investments across Hutchison's core areas of infrastructure, energy, telecoms, shipping and retail. Attempts to expand telecoms holdings beyond Hutchinson's ownership of 3 Group Europe were met with an obstacle, however, in the form of EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager (see seven), who blocked attempts to buy Telefónica's O2 business in the UK. China's state press have responded negatively to the international shift in focus, accusing Li, 88, of abandoning the country. Yet his property empire, Cheung Kong Property Holdings, remains largely local, with the majority of its holdings located in Hong Kong. Li's "third son", the Li Ka-shing Foundation, has also kept the focus at home, donating more than HK $20 billion, 87 per cent in the greater China region, to furthering education and medical research. And, in Horizons Ventures, he has big clout in VC.

14. Xavier Niel

Founder, Free, 42 and 1000 Startups; co-owner, Le Monde, Paris

In the French press (excepting Le Monde, which he co-owns), telco billionaire Xavier Niel is eagerly covered for his relationship with Louis Vuitton VP Delphine Arnault, his colourful investments (from high-profile real estate to co-ownership of the song "My Way"), his ambitiously internationalising company Iliad (owner of France's Free ISP and mobile network), and his unconventional path to a fortune valued by Forbes at $7.6bn (let's not mention a brief 2004 imprisonment following an investigation into a peep-show business in which he had invested).

No, what puts Xiel, 48, in the upper ranks of the 2016 global WIRED 100 is his standout role as France's transformative enabler of future tech stars.

It's not just that his Kima Ventures calls itself "the world's most active angel fund", investing in two to three startups per week from Paris and already with stakes in more than 350 businesses in dozens of countries. It's also that Niel is reinventing the notion of university after declaring in 2013 that "the education system doesn't work". His answer: an ambitious merit-based coding school without teachers, without a syllabus, without entrance requirements and without fees.

The school, called 42 (the answer to the question of "life, the universe and everything" in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), is on an unassuming street in Paris's 17th arrondissement. "We have 80,000 applicants a year who play an online game, and 25,000 finish," Niel explains amid banks of 1,000 iMacs on a Thursday morning in May. "We take the 3,000 best and ask them to come to the school for a month – that's 450 hours of 15-hour days, including Saturday and Sunday. After five or six days, a third leave. And then we take the 1,000 best."

The survivors – 80 to 90 per cent French, but including Americans and Brits – win a free education, help in finding a flat, loan guarantees of ˇ15,000 if needed, and access to high-quality internships. "Forty per cent don't have a Baccalaureate – half the students in this school are from poor families and wouldn't be able to afford it," Niel says. "Our business model is very easy. It's my credit card."

Niel committed €20 million to launch the school, and around €7 million a year in running costs to cover the first decade in operation. "After that," he says, pointing to three students, "we hope one of you three guys will be the next Mark Zuckerberg."

This year, he's opening a second branch in Fremont, California, with a $100 million commitment. The Silicon Valley stars who have visited the original 42 need no convincing. "You feel you're walking into a school from the future," according to Snapchat's Evan Spiegel. "It's a transformative way to learn."

13. Travis Kalanick

As it conquers territory after territory, Uber's value to investors topped $68 billion. To combat bad press, Kalanick has announced a plan to focus on shared cars and reduce air pollution in the 68 countries it operates in.

12. Jony Ive

Ive's hand in the world's most fetishised tech products makes him the most influential designer of his generation. In the short term, consumers are waiting for Ive's iPhone 7; in the long term, they're anticipating his car.

11. Jeff Bezos

Bezos hopes to take tourists into orbit in 2018 with his space travel company, Blue Origin. On Earth, Amazon continues to dominate online commerce and is by far the largest cloud services provider on the planet.

10. Sheryl Sandberg

Sandberg has deftly moved Facebook on to mobile - by Q3 2015, the platform accounted for 78 per cent of its revenue. Only Google can compete with Facebook's 1.65 billion mobile app users and 400 million Instagram users.

7. Margrethe Vestager

European Commissioner for Competition, Brussels

The European Union's current competition commissioner doesn't believe in starting small. Appointed in November 2014, within her first year in office Vestager, now 48, had launched formal investigations into Google, Amazon and Russian stock company Gazprom.

Alongside this, the Dane also pursued investigations into the tax affairs of Starbucks, Fiat, Apple, and Amazon again, ruling on fines of up to €30 million each in the first two cases.

The UK's tax arrangement with Google hasn't escaped Vestager's notice either, and last January SNP deputy leader Stewart Hosie requested she investigate the government's £130 million tax deal with the search giant. With the launch of a second investigation relating to restrictions in the Android ecosystem and given her power to fine a company as much as ten per cent of global turnover, Vestager has real bite - even as the EU itself faces its biggest crisis.

5. Larry Page

In February, Alphabet briefly became the world's most valuable company, with a market cap of $547 billion. As it expands its Calico, Nest and investment divisions, its scale and ambition is second to none.

Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent, which created WeChat

Magnus Voll Mathiassen

4. Ma Huateng

Even without the Chinese government's ban, Facebook's eastern expansion would face a formidable opponent in Tencent Holdings, the brainchild of Ma Huateng, aka Pony Ma. Embracing mobile-first long before the American internet titan had figured that out, Tencent's WeChat, launched in 2011, is about more than messaging. It's a social gaming hub, e-commerce network, taxi-hailing service, news feed, government services portal and mobile payments processor.

And it has 700 million monthly active users in China alone. Not to mention Tencent's desktop-native QQ chat, which has more than 870 million active users.

The introduction of live message translation in QQ and the rebranding of WeChat from its former Chinese name of Weixin have signalled Ma's intentions lie further afield than China. Avoiding Facebook's western strongholds, Tencent has turned instead to the emerging markets of South Africa and Nigeria, where - although WhatsApp still dominates - WeChat's additional services may give Tencent the edge.

3. Tim Cook

Cook's refusal to have the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters unlocked proved Apple's respect for privacy. Sales in China may be slowing, but it still sets the standards for UX and product innovation.

1. Elon Musk

For a man desperate to escape planet Earth, Elon Musk is awfully concerned with preserving it - whether saving it from the ravages of out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) or humanity's own self-destructive inability to limit energy consumption. A good thing, given that, although the SpaceX founder and CEO may be planning to establish a Martian colony in our lifetime, few of us will be able to afford the ticket.

Musk's many nominations for the WIRED 100 were focused not simply on his work to push the limits of human space exploration, but also on his Earth-bound efforts as founder and CEO of Tesla to change the way we move around this planet, by making electric vehicles desirable, increasingly affordable, and eventually capable of driving themselves.

To fuel the vehicles of the future, Musk's Gigafactory in Nevada aims to produce more batteries annually by 2020 than were produced worldwide in 2013. Batteries destined not only for cars but also for homes and businesses, providing the storage capacity needed to support the variable output of solar or wind energy.

Silicon Valley billionaires often talk about making the world a better place, but few back their dream so boldly as Musk, 45. In the past year, he's live-streamed successful launches and retrievals of his reusable Falcon 9 rocket; started selling the Tesla Model X all-electric SUV and unveiled the prototype for his mass-market Model 3 (Musk pointed out that the model types for his three cars to date spelled S3X); announced a competition to test designs for his Hyperloop high-speed transportation system - which uses reduced-pressure tubes to reach speeds around 970kph; and launched his not-for-profit AI research company OpenAI, with the aim of both advancing the field and making AI research freely accessible.

So, if Tesla's autonomous cars do turn against us, at least we'll know how they work.

In December 2015, figures from GTM Research showed Musk's green-power company SolarCity accounted for 34 per cent of the residential solar panel installations in the US, making it the market leader. Each one of these alone would be enough for most billionaires. For Musk, they just fuel his ambition (and in June Tesla bid to take over SolarCity). His sense of urgency can be palpable - he's known for being brusque, leaping from topic to topic in conversations, impatient with those who can't keep up.

All of which underlines Iron Man director Jon Favreau's use of Musk as the inspiration behind maverick tech billionaire Tony Stark. Although he's not yet working on an armoured suit, in many ways Musk is starting to look a lot less like the typical Silicon Valley player and a lot more like an old-school industrialist.

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He's investing his own fortune gained from founding and selling city guide startup Zip2 and online payments pioneer PayPal, but also openly accepting significant government subsidy for SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity in the same way gilded-era railroad barons accepted federal support to build transport infrastructure.

Falcon 1, launched in 2008, was the first privately funded rocket to reach orbit - followed by the launch and recovery of Dragon, the future replacement for the Space Shuttle. He hopes to send humans to Mars within ten to 20 years, which seems an achievable goal next to persuading Americans to swap their beloved gas-guzzling road monsters for nimble electrical vehicles. But with advance orders for the Model 3 topping $10 billion (£6.9bn) in the first two days after orders opened in spring 2016, it looks like he might have a chance.

It's notable that, after warning against the dangers of AI - in a joint letter with Stephen Hawking last January that argued that its benefits could be outweighed by its potential to destroy the human race - Musk's OpenAI aims to open-source AI research in a bid reduce the risk of this apocalypse.